Steve Biko and SASO

With the ANC and the PAC banned and African political activity
officially limited to government-appointed bodies in the homelands,
young people sought alternative means to express their political
aspirations. In the early 1960s, African university students looked to
the multiracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to
represent their concerns, but, as this organization adopted an
increasingly conservative stance after Vorster's crackdown, they decided
to form their own movement. Led by Steve Biko, an African medical
student at the University of Natal, a group of black students
established the South African Students' Organisation (SASO) in 1969 with
Biko as president. Biko, strongly influenced by the writings of Lembede
and by the Black Power movement in the United States, argued that
Africans had to run their own organizations; they could not rely on
white liberals because such people would always ally in the last resort
with other whites rather than with blacks. He argued that blacks often
oppressed themselves by accepting the second-class status accorded them
by the apartheid system, and he stressed that they had to liberate
themselves mentally as well as physically. He rejected, however, the use
of violence adopted by the ANC and the PAC in the early 1960s and
emphasized that only nonviolent methods should be used in the struggle
against apartheid.

Biko's message had an immediate appeal; SASO expanded enormously, and
its members established black self-help projects, including workshops
and medical clinics, in many parts of South Africa. In 1972 the Black
Peoples' Convention (BPC) was set up to act as a political umbrella
organization for the adherents of black consciousness. Although the
government had at first welcomed the development of black consciousness
because the philosophy fit in with the racial separation inherent in
apartheid, it sought to restrict the activities of Biko and his
organizations when these took a more overtly political turn. In 1972,
SASO organized strikes on university campuses resulting in the arrest of
more than 600 students. Rallies held by SASO and the BPC in 1974 to
celebrate the overthrow of Portuguese colonialism in Angola and
Mozambique resulted in the banning of Biko and other black consciousness
leaders and their arraignment on charges of fomenting terrorism.